Fellow CAUTs, February is upon us, and before we know it it will be time for the annual convention in Chicago (early this year - end of June). We are hoping to present and act on a newly revised/improved Guidelines for Effective Institutional Piano Maintenance at that time. Meaning time is really rather short to get that work completed. I have been heading up the effort to revise the workload formula. My article in, I think, the October PTJ covered the why and what of what has been proposed so far. Don McKechnie and David Porritt posted databases and templates on the caut page including the newly proposed numbers. We badly need feedback, to be sure we're on the right track, and, especially, to finetune to the extent possible. So far, the only substantive feedback I have received came from Jeff Tanner (thanks, Jeff, for some very insightful comments). So this is a plea to all of you to try out the new numbers at your institution, and let us know how they come out. Do they produce a workload number that is close to what your honest, practical advice would be? Are there areas that seem wrong? I have used both David's and Don's databases. They are quite user friendly and convenient. In each you can go to a cell either by mouse or keystroke. In the cell you can type in a value or use the mouse to select a value from a pull-down menu. Don made some macros so you can enter a default value in every cell in certain columns (like humidity variation, which is likely to be the same for every room in a building). Don's is a stand alone program, in both mac and windows formats It took me about 3 hours to enter my 80 pianos. I could probably have got that time down if I had thought it through a little better. A couple suggestions for efficiency: Take your existing database/spreadsheet. Sort by manufacturer and model. Put it in table form with serial #, room #, make and model showing. Size the window to fit about half the screen. THen open the formula database and size it to fit the other half of the screen. Copy and paste in serial numbers, and enter room, make, and upright/grand. Then go through and enter the other data. Having the pianos sorted will mean there will be a lot of the same numbers in sequential records: eg, pretty much all my Hamiltons are the same age, condition, acceptable standard. So I think once, then enter a whole bunch. Thanks for your help. Let's try to make this something we can really use for many years to come. Regards, Fred Sturm University of New Mexico PS The Caut page is http://www.mursuky.edu/caut.php/homepage.htm If you'd like a copy of my PTJ article, email me privately and I'll send it to you.
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